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Bloodborne will offer truly perilous combat

Japanese developer From Software is famous for Dark Souls, the games which define brutal but fair difficulty for today's gaming generation. Now the studio is working on PS4 exclusive Bloodborne, and aims to challenge players in a whole new way.

"Were not really going for this kind of over-violent horror feel to the game," producer Masaaki Yamagiwa has told VG247. "What we want to do is make the user feel terror at each turn, and once youre in a combat situation, whatever it may be, that you have a huge sense of relief as well as still maintaining that level of achievement you get from playing something from the Souls series."

The key way the game does this is via the new Regain system, which unlike the block-and-counter graceful fighting of the Souls games instead offers a brief window where you can win back lost health by going on the attack. The idea is to encourage players to get stuck in, without losing their cool.

"It leads the player into the exchange of deadly blows and really draws the user into the perilous combat that we want to deliver," Yamagiwa says. "With things like the shield its quite obvious that the attacks going to come in and you time the block with the shield, but with this youre looking for an opportunity to get your own hit back. If you go in blindly and take multiple hits then you will miss that opportunity to get the health back.

"Visually its going to look pretty crazy, but in the midst of the craziness of the battle you still have to keep your cool. You have to watch what your enemies are doing and how many of them there are, what kind of movement thatre doing and really measure your attacks, and really look for the opportunity to get your own hit back. You cant leave it for too long."

Bloodborne is out in 2015 exclusively for PlayStation 4. It's already shaping up to be one of the best looking games around.